A Westchester judge yesterday denounced a convicted murderer as “the face of evil” as he hit him with a 25-years-to-life sentence for the stabbing death of a woman – “because she was white.”

Phillip Grant, 44, showed no emotion as Judge Lester Adler announced he was imposing the maximum sentence because “You lack a sense of decency or respect for human life. You are a clear and present danger.”

“I do not believe you deserve one second less than the rest of your life in jail,” Adler said.

Grant, a homeless ex-con who served 24 years in prison for rape and attempted assault, was found guilty this summer of fatally stabbing Concetta Russo-Carriero, a 56-year-old legal secretary in June 2005 in the Galleria mall in downtown White Plains, using a knife he had stolen from a nearby store.

In a taped confession on the day of the slaying, Grant claimed he was fighting a race war.

“As long as she had blond hair and blue eyes, she had to die,” he said of Russo-Carriero, whom he attacked as she walked to her car.

He said the mother of two “was not an innocent victim – because she was white,” adding, “If I’d have had a gun . . . there’d be a lot of dead white people on the streets of White Plains.”

Before Adler imposed sentence, letters from Russo-Carriero’s two sons were read to the court by prosecutor Tim Ward in a voice that cracked with emotion.

In his letter, elder son Jonathan Russo, 29, called Grant “this animal” and “a vicious beast,” and wrote that his memories of his mother “while much too short, will fill my heart and soul for the rest of my life.”

Michael Russo, 23, noted that “what was once a warm and loving home is now a cold house filled only with me and memories of what once was . . . Nothing can replace the hole in my heart carved out by Phillip Grant.